Wildlife's taste for horticultural crops costs millions of dollars, study says

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

by SUSAN MANN

Deer, rabbits and mice are munching their way through $24.8 million worth of Ontario’s horticultural crops annually, according to preliminary results from an Ontario Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association study.

Brian Gilroy, association property section chair, says that’s a conservative estimate. The figure is estimated from a survey of growers and commodity organizations. The study, being done by Susan Fitzgerald, is due to completed at the end of March.

Gilroy, who has an apple farm near Georgian Bay, says he’s seen the damage deer cause to trees first hand. “The trees are planted and you come back in a couple of days and they look like sticks.”

Some people can’t plant an orchard at all in parts of the Georgian Bay area and in other areas of the province because of deer.

Wildlife damage is tricky to measure, particularly in tree fruit where deer nip off the tops of young trees, throwing them out of balance. Trees could be affected for their entire lives. Deer are also eating vegetable crops, while birds are chowing down on grapes. “In some of the vegetable crops the damage is incredible there as well. It’s enough to make you cry,” Gilroy says.

Measures to protect against mice, which girdle the bark around the bottom of the tree killing it, include mice baits, tree guards and paint for trees. But tree guards are an expensive option for today’s high-density orchards that can have 1,200 trees per acre, so they’re not used as much anymore. Most people have gone to using paint and traps, notes Gilroy.

“We’ve got a reasonable handle on mouse damage and that didn’t really come up that much in the survey,” he says.

In some other provinces there are stand-alone programs under Growing Forward, the national agricultural policy, to provide compensation for growers for wildlife damage. “That was one of the pillars of Growing Forward and for whatever reason Ontario didn’t pick up on that,” he says. Crop insurance plans in other provinces have wildlife damage listed as an insured peril, but that isn’t available for horticultural crops in Ontario.

Gilroy says they’d like to see a program that protects Ontario growers from wildlife damage. BF